South Carolina’s senior senator, Republican Lindsey Graham, has long been second to none — not even his good buddy Sen. John McCain — when it comes to obsessing over the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. Seriously, he’s relentless.

And yet, we have to admit we were still surprised to find on Tuesday that this tweet, which was sent out from his official Twitter account, actually exists in the world and is not a ham-fisted joke from Bill Maher or Jon Stewart:

It started with Benghazi. When you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite this type of aggression. #Ukraine

So, just to be clear, here’s how Graham thinks things went down in Eastern Europe:

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*Vladimir Putin saw his Ukrainian neighbor to the West falling into disarray and, potentially, a closer alliance with Western Europe and the United States.

*He also knew that the Crimea province of Ukraine was full of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, many of whom think of themselves more as Russians than Ukrainians.

*Weighing his options, Putin remembered how terrorists attacked representatives of the U.S. in Benghazi more than one year ago and said to himself, “Well, if Obama didn’t do whatever Lindsey Graham seems to think he should have done in response to that attack, then he surely won’t be willing to start a new world war over Crimea!”

*And — boom! — just like that, Russia swiftly and bloodlessly all but annexed a chunk of Ukraine, all because of some unspecified thing that Obama should have done in response to a terrorist attack on Benghazi that happened more than a year ago and that had absolutely nothing to do with Vladimir Putin, Russia, Ukraine, Crimea or Eastern Europe in general.

Elias Isquith is a staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith.